Try our new AI powered Smart-Search!
Back in the mid 1970s, when I was starting out in the video business, television engineers told me the U-Matic tape format was not good enough for broadcast. Within a few years the 3/4-inch cassette transformed TV, creating the ENG revolution. Not much has changed since in attitudes.
The broadcast industry is mired in a state of resolution confusion. HD is the format du jour, 4K UHD is emerging quickly and proponents of 8K refuse to stay quiet. For a broadcast engineer, it’s enough to make your head spin.
As High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (i.e.BT.2020) are increasingly mandated by major industry players like Netflix and Amazon, DOPs in the broadcast realm are under intense pressure to get it right during original image capture. We all know (or learned the hard way) that the amount of detail required to produce an optimal HDR master cannot be recreated or effectively added downstream.
With a growing number of online outlets providing an accessible platform for video distribution, the walls to television broadcasting have rapidly fallen. Unfortunately, the barriers to good television programming remains as high as ever.
HDR Profiles - Pros & Cons. An obstacle to HDR adoption has been figuring out how legacy SDR TVs should display an HDR signal. There are about 1.6 Billion TV sets world-wide and 300 Million TV sets in the US.
A long chain of events is needed to see a color picture on a TV set. Only by considering every link in the chain can we strengthen any weak links.
Following a rash of 4K UHD products that hit the market two years ago, cameras with high dynamic range (HDR) capability also began to emerge as a less costly alternative to improving signal quality. Indeed, HDR had a strong showing at the 2017 CES, with different TV manufacturers pledging support for Dolby Vision (PQ) and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) systems in addition to the baseline HDR10 standard.
HDR is a technology that is evolving quickly on the Professional and Consumer side. Like all new technologies, the devil is in the details. There is confusion about the technical aspects of which HDR technique and implementation are best for a given situation.